AI in the Workplace: A Practical Guide to Get Started

TL;DR

AI isn't here to take your job (yet), it's here to be your assistant. ¹¹Start with small, non-critical tasks like summarizing meetings to build trust and reclaim hours in your week. ²²²² #VentureStep #AI #Productivity

INTRODUCTION

Tired of hearing about the AI revolution without knowing how it can actually help you day-to-day? ³ In a world saturated with AI hype, it's easy to feel overwhelmed or even apprehensive about integrating these powerful tools into your workflow. The conversation often swings between utopian promises and dystopian fears, leaving a gap where practical, actionable advice should be. Many professionals wonder how to start without wasting time, compromising sensitive information, or feeling like they're falling behind. ⁴

This episode of Venture Step cuts through the noise to offer a clear starting guide. Host Dalton Anderson shares his expertise in data science and programming to demystify AI for the everyday user. 5Inspired by a conversation with his own family, he addresses the common fears and questions that prevent people from taking their first step. 6666 This isn't about complex theory; it's a hands-on manual for building a productive relationship with AI.

From brainstorming technical solutions to automating tedious administrative tasks, you'll learn how to identify pain points in your workflow and apply AI as a solution. ⁷Dalton provides specific use cases for technical, management, and processing roles, demonstrating how to train AI on your personal style and templates to save hours of work. ⁸⁸⁸⁸ This episode is your guide to turning AI from an intimidating concept into your most valuable assistant.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Start small with non-critical tasks to build confidence and trust with AI models before moving to more complex work. ⁹
• Reframe AI as a personal assistant designed to handle recurring, time-consuming tasks, not as an immediate replacement for your job. ¹⁰
• Train AI on your specific templates and writing style to automate tasks like creating structured meeting notes from a raw transcript or drafting routine emails. ¹¹¹¹¹¹
• Use AI as a thought partner to brainstorm solutions, debug code, or weigh the pros and cons of different technical approaches, speeding up your decision-making process. ¹²¹²¹²
• Always verify AI outputs for accuracy, as models can have "hallucinations" or produce incorrect information, requiring a human touch for review. ¹³

FULL CONVERSATION

Dalton: Welcome to VentureStep podcast where we discuss entrepreneurship, industry trends, and the occasional book review. ¹⁴Tired of hearing AI without knowing how it can help you? ¹⁵In this episode, we're ditching the hype and getting practical. ¹⁶We'll uncover simple, everyday ways to use AI to boost your productivity, spark your creativity, and even streamline your chores. ¹⁷Plus, we'll tackle your nagging doubts and fears about getting started with AI. ¹⁸If you're ready to take the first step in this AI revolution, this episode is your guide. ¹⁹

Why Is It Time to Get Practical with AI?

Dalton: I think it's important to get practical now because my thoughts are AI is going to become more mainstream. ²⁰We have the recent announcement of Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs, which will be an AI-integrated work machine. ²¹They'll have an AI chip that will be used solely for AI workloads. ²²Google has had the same thing in their Pixel phones since the Pixel 8. ²³Then we have ChatGPT-O launching with the conversational stuff. ²⁴Microsoft is increasing their partnership with OpenAI and launching these AI-enabled work PCs, and they are seeing AI as a way to win back market share from Apple. ²⁵

These models are becoming more useful and easier to use. ²⁶You don't have to type anything out. ²⁷You can talk to the AI and ask the AI what it needs from you to have the best prompt or get the best results. ²⁸Things are becoming more open and it's not only an early adopter space, it's becoming a space that is mainstream and everyone is involved. ²⁹

How to Build Trust With Your New AI Assistant

Dalton: The first thing that you need to recognize is they're not going to immediately take your job. ³⁰ I think people have anxiety about these models outright replacing them. In many jobs, you need to have a human touch. ³¹You need to review it, you need to communicate with other people, you need to make decisions that don't necessarily compute to an input-output kind of situation. ³²

The current state of these models is you're not gonna turn it on, flip a switch, and then you're gone. ³³

Dalton: So you should think about these models as your little helper. ³⁴It helps you save time with this assistant that you have. ³⁵These AI models are willing and happy to help. ³⁶You can give it your little tasks and it could help you out and save you time. ³⁷Maybe it's not something where you're saving an hour-plus every day, but if you have a task that you routinely do every day and it's 20, 30 minutes, you can use these models to enable yourself. ³⁸Instead of it being 10 minutes, maybe it's a minute and a half. ³⁹You copy-paste what you want, you get the output, you review it, and then you carry on with your day. ⁴⁰

You should start small with non-critical tasks, things that aren't important, maybe it's just yourself. So you're the only one who sees this information, it's strictly for yourself, so you can slowly build trust with the AI. 41

Dalton: I encourage that you experiment with different prompts. ⁴²The words that you use in your prompt matter to the output. ⁴³ It will have a direct influence. So how you say something is very important, where it's clear and concise. ⁴⁴ I always say please and thank you. I'm very polite to my AI friends, just in case. ⁴⁵

Practical AI Use Cases for Technical Roles

Dalton: For technical jobs, you can use it to help think through difficult problems. ⁴⁶I do this at work where I have a situation where I need to make a decision on the implementation of something. ⁴⁷I can ask questions like, okay, for this library using this formula, what are my other options? ⁴⁸What are the pros and cons of each approach? ⁴⁹With this person that I can bounce ideas off from, it enables me to make a thoughtful decision quicker on the approach. ⁵⁰So I spend less time on mental mapping the approach and spend more time implementing. ⁵¹

If you implement the project incorrectly the first time, it might require rework later on either because it's too slow, too difficult to maintain, or just it didn't get the right outcome. ⁵²

Dalton: You can also troubleshoot your code. ⁵³It's very common to where you might inherit someone's code and they didn't put comments. ⁵⁴It's just a mess and it's difficult to understand. ⁵⁵You can use AI to break down the code and explain it. ⁵⁶AI will be able to logically explain each step and why that step was taken from the script. ⁵⁷It allows you to understand someone else's code, learn new approaches by being walked through complex code, and help with troubleshooting bugs. ⁵⁸All of that stuff saves an incredible amount of time. ⁵⁹

Using AI for Management and Processing Tasks

Dalton: Any management job, you have to send a lot of emails and meeting notes. ⁶⁰If you have a certain email that you write to the team every week, and it takes you a long time to write everything down, then transform that into an email, AI can do that. ⁶¹You could dictate your unorganized thoughts, train the AI to know your template, and from there, it would take that unstructured thought process and structure it into your template email. ^62626262

For processing positions, you could use it for document processing. ⁶³Maybe you have to read through various newsletters and then summarize them with key points. ⁶⁴You could ask AI to summarize the document and also tell you the key locations that you should review yourself. ⁶⁵Of course, when you're doing any of these things, you need to verify the information and make sure things are correct. ⁶⁶Don't just take AI's word for it, because AI does have hallucinations. ⁶⁷

How to Start Implementing AI in Your Workflow

Dalton: I think you should identify some pain points in your day-to-day life. ⁶⁸You should think about what recurring tasks you do consistently. ⁶⁹Do I always send out weekly emails to the team? ⁷⁰Do I have issues getting meeting notes put together? ⁷¹Am I having a difficult time getting ahold of my peers to think through some of these difficult problems? ⁷²You could use research tools for your industry. ⁷³Over time, you will gradually scale as you become more comfortable with AI and as society becomes more comfortable. ⁷⁴

A Practical Demo: Structuring Meeting Notes with AI

Dalton: I had a meeting notes example created. ⁷⁵I asked AI, "I want to create a meeting notes template and I'll provide you the exact example when you're ready." ⁷⁶I sent it a template with meeting name, date, attendees, and subjects with bullet points and action items. ^77777777Then, I had a confusing seven-page transcription from a meeting with seven different people. ^78787878It's difficult to comb through to make your notes and figure out who's responsible for what. ⁷⁹

So I copied and pasted that into the chat and said, "I have a meeting transcription, can you please turn this into meeting notes?" ⁸⁰It took that unstructured information and structured it for me. ⁸¹It named the project, listed the attendees, and broke down the subjects. ⁸²For example, under "Project Timeline and MVP Strategy," it listed bullet points and then clear action items: "Product team: finalize wireframes and revise scope by end of day. ^83838383Sandra from IT: manage the database setup." ⁸⁴It went on and on with action items for each group. ⁸⁵

You can have a template of what you want your meeting notes to be, where it's consistently your identity, and you can have AI structure that information for you. ⁸⁶

Dalton: This is something that would save you hours of your time. ⁸⁷You're not having to create everything from scratch. ⁸⁸

Training AI to Match Your Writing Style

Dalton: I have another example with email. ⁸⁹I said, "I need help writing and I would like you to use my writing style. I would like to train you with a few examples. I'll enact training when I say START TRAINING and end it when I say END TRAINING." ⁹⁰So I said, "START TRAINING" and fed AI five emails of how I would like it to communicate. ⁹¹The emails have a bit of humor and are clear and direct. ⁹²

After I ended the training, I said, "Send an email to Sarah requesting additional information as you're concerned about the timelines and wanna regroup." ⁹³It produced a perfect email in my style: "Hey Sarah, I hope you're doing well. I'm reaching out because I'm a bit concerned about our timelines and I'd love to get some additional information. Could we possibly regroup to further discuss?" ⁹⁴

Using AI to Troubleshoot and Correct Code

Dalton: My other example was a coding demo. ⁹⁵I sent in code that had an error—maybe six errors in total, like calling the wrong variable and logic errors. ⁹⁶I put in, "Can you help me fix this code block? Someone left the company and I need to fix this code for my live demo." ⁹⁷AI came back with a corrected version and also explained the changes it made. ⁹⁸It said, "I fixed the typo in

process_data. The function was missing a closing quote... I adjusted the filtered_data list comprehension to make it more readable." ⁹⁹That kind of stuff does save a lot of time. ¹⁰⁰

Final Takeaways

Dalton: The main takeaway is we want to build trust with AI. ¹⁰¹We want to start small with non-critical tasks and discover your pain points where you could potentially slot in some AI help. ¹⁰²

You wanna be the reviewer, not necessarily the process person. ¹⁰³

Dalton: You can automate these things with AI as much as possible. ¹⁰⁴If you do that, you'll save a lot of time and have more time to spend on more important items. ¹⁰⁵I would like all of us to explore AI. ¹⁰⁶I want you to leverage AI in your work and just give it a try. ¹⁰⁷

AI is coming and it's gonna become mainstream and if you adopt now, you have the potential to be the expert at your company internally. ¹⁰⁸

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Microsoft Copilot+ PCs
• Google Pixel Phones (Pixel 8, Pixel 9)
• ChatGPT-O
• OpenAI
• Claude
• Google Gemini
• Apple
• Riverside

INDEX OF CONCEPTS

AI assistant, AI helper, Agile, Apple, Claude, code review, Copilot+ PCs, Dalton Anderson, data wrangling, document processing, email writing, Frank, getting started with AI, Google, Google Gemini, Gwen, hallucinations, Jupiter, Florida, Kay, large language models, management tasks, meeting notes, Microsoft, OpenAI, Pixel 8, Pixel 9, predictive analytics, processing jobs, productivity, Project Phoenix, rejections, Riverside, Sandra, Sean, technical jobs